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Sunday, March 29, 2015

As
of late, I have been thinking about how my patterns of reading have changed,
and not changed, over the years. Reading is my lifelong hobby. I have almost
always been consistent reader. Yet there have been times where I must admit
that I have gone into lulls. Despite what I label as “lulls,” there have never really
been very long stretches of time when I did not read.

However,
there were times that, like most readers, I would go into shorter slumps. These
have been stretches of a few months, during which I did not read much. Of
course, during periods when my education preoccupied my time, my reading would
slow to a crawl and sometimes stop altogether. I will admit, however, that at other
times I neglected my studies in lieu of doing some reading for pleasure.

There
have been reasons other than education for these short reading slumps. I recall that when I first discovered the
Internet, I did not read books for a couple of months. It was during this time
when I wondered if I would ever begin heavy reading again. Ultimately, the
allure of the digital world was, in the end, no match for my persistent desire
to delve into the intricate details and ideas contained in real books. After a
few months, I returned to my lifetime hobby.

These
days, with reading time as a premium, these non-reading lulls have entirely
disappeared from my life. Due to this scarcity of reading time I have not gone
into a slump for years. Instead, I hunger for more hours to read.

The
other thing that I do now that I never did in previous years is read two books
simultaneously. I recall that when I attempted this years ago, I would
invariably neglect one book for the other. The more interesting tome would get
the most attention, and the less interesting one would be so neglected. Thus, it
became impossible to maintain a coherent train of thought on the neglected
book’s contents. Once again, that problem has disappeared, and I find that I
can easily apportion my time between almost any pair of books. If I am going a
little slower on one, as opposed to the other, I will usually just speed up on
the one, after I complete the more interesting work. Though my ongoing plan is
to read one fiction and one non-fiction book simultaneously, it does not always
work out that way. I often find myself reading two fiction or two non-fiction
books together.

My
reading patterns have changed quite a lot over the years. Obviously, external
factors have played a good part in this. I wonder how they will be changed when
I look back again in twenty to thirty years. I think however, that it is likely
that I will still be reading as much as time permits, which will not be enough.

Saturday, March 21, 2015

From time to time, I am posting my thoughts on
particular Shakespeare Sonnets. For now, I am proceeding in order.

Is it for
fear to wet a widow's eye

That thou
consumest thyself in single life?

Ah! if thou
issueless shalt hap to die,

The world
will wail thee, like a makeless wife;

The world will
be thy widow and still weep

That thou no
form of thee hast left behind,

When every
private widow well may keep

By
children's eyes her husband's shape in mind.

Look what an
unthrift in the world doth spend

Shifts but
his place, for still the world enjoys it;

But beauty's
waste hath in the world an end,

And kept
unused, the user so destroys it.

No love
toward others in that bosom sits

That on
himself such murderous shame commits.

As in the
previous Sonnets, the voice of the narrative is imploring the Fair Youth to
marry and have children. The subject of all this attention is initially
questioned. Does he fear that he will leave someone a widow if he marries and
then dies? The Fair Youth is next lectured that he will be depriving the world
of the continuation of his own beauty should he die without progeny. We have
heard similar arguments before in this sequence of poems.

The last two
lines of this Sonnet catch my attention.

No love toward others in that bosom sits

That on himself such murderous shame commits.

I like these
lines from an aesthetic perspective, but they seem to be introducing something
new into the Sonnets. The words seem a little angry, and perhaps they are even
a little desperate. By this time in the sequence of Sonnets, the voice of the
poem has used all sorts of arguments and devices to try to convince his subject
to marry and have children. These lines may indicate a certain level of
frustration.

Shakespeare’s
motivation for writing these Sonnets has puzzled people for generations. I
myself have ruminated upon these motivations in my previous posts. Regardless
of the question of whether Shakespeare was trying to speak for himself here or
not, this turn into what appears to be slightly exasperated language seems to further
illustrate that the poet has created a multifaceted character in the voice of
the poem. There are indeed many sides to this speaker.

As I have
explored in previous posts, this unseen narrator is capable of sublime
language, humor and allegories that range from the common to the clever to the
soaring. Now, if I am reading this accurately, a little bit of vexation has
been infused.

Saturday, March 14, 2015

A recent reread
of Homer‘s The Odyssey has me pondering the Cyclops Polyphémus. I believe that this is my fourth reading of this epic poem. This time
around, I seem to have developed a mini-fascination with the one-eyed giant.

After Odysseus and members of his crew enter Polyphémus’s cave hoping for a warm
welcome, the Cyclops imprisons the crew and begins to brutally murder and devour
them one by one. Obviously, this monster is not a very sympathetic character.
He embodies maliciousness. However, on closer examination, the depiction of his
behavior raises some interesting questions. When we examine Polyphémus’s
murderous actions, as opposed to the actions of the work’s hero, Odysseus, I think that some surprises are in store.

We are often told not to attempt to
apply modern morality to these ancient works. Many of the tenets of our present
day belief systems did not apply when they were written. This is fair enough,
but I think that it will be helpful if we do a quick examination of the work
based upon our modern values in order to determine what is not meant to be pernicious
in terms of the Cyclops’s action.

Odysseus and his crew are the sackers of
cities. When they overran Troy, as well as other places mentioned in the poem,
they murdered defenseless citizens, raped and kidnapped the women, who along
with the children were subjected to a life of slavery. Odysseus, based upon
modern standards, is guilty of crimes against humanity and perhaps genocide.

When the crew encounters Polyphémus, he
begins to bash them against the walls of the cave, and then he proceeds to gruesomely
eat their lifeless, raw flesh. This is really ugly behavior, to say the least. However,
in comparison to what the protagonists of the poem have done, it seems no
worse, and perhaps not even as bad. In fact, again based our twenty-first
century concepts of justice, one might say that Odysseus and his men received
their just desserts.

So can we say that Polyphémus has done
anything wrong based on the moral framework of the epic? The Cyclops is clearly
meant to be a malevolent character, but perhaps not for the reasons that we
think. Our first clue that there is something very wrong with the Cyclopes in
general is presented at following juncture, when the society of the one eyed
giants is described as,

"a violent race
without any laws, who neither plant crops nor plow but leave their whole
livelihood to the care of the gods. These creatures don’t come together in
public assemblies and aren’t governed by statutes, but they all live in caves
high up near the mountaintops, and each one is a law to himself and rules his
children and wives and doesn’t care about any neighbor or kinsman."

I know only a moderate amount about Greek culture and
ethics, but it seems that the Cyclopes are being criticized here for not living
as a civilized community. Public assemblies and statutes were a big part of
life in the Greek City states. The Cyclopes have none, and they do not care
about each other or their community.

Before Odysseus encounters the giant, he
wonders what the entire race might be like,

"are they savageand violent, or
are they good law-abiding people who fear the gods and show proper kindness to
strangers?"

The kindness to strangers seems key
to me. I think that within the morality of the play, hospitality to visitors
and strangers is an essential part of moral behavior. Hospitality is a trait
that the law abiding and the reverent exhibit. Odysseus and his men enter Polyphémus’s cave, begin to eat his food
and wait around for him as if they expect to be welcomed as guests. When the Cyclops
arrives, he shows his true colors by brutally murdering and eating them.

Throughout other parts of the work,
virtuous people show kindness and generosity to strangers. In one of many examples,
when Eumaeus the swineherd believes that Odysseus is
just a forlorn and destitute traveler, he explains why he took the disguised
hero in and exhibited kindness, he states,

“It
wouldn’t be right for me to treat any stranger, even one worse-off than you
are, with disrespect, since strangers and beggars come under Zeus’s protection”

So, in the odd and ancient moral
framework, it is acceptable to sack a city and to murder and rape its
inhabitants. However, it is essential that one treats visitors with respect and
kindness. Only the lawless who live without strong community do not provide
such hospitality. This, of course, seems bizarre to me. It illustrates how the concept
of morality has changed so much down the millennia.

Despite Polyphémus’s actions, another
question arises; is the Cyclops a complete monster with no redeeming qualities?
He may indeed be a monster, but I suspect that there may be a little humanity
in him.

At one point Odysseus and his remaining
men escape the cave by tying themselves to the Cyclops’s sheep who are leaving
the cave for their morning grazing. Odysseus is tied to the last ram in the
line. The blinded Polyphemus is surprised that his strongest ram, unbeknownst
to him, weighed down by Odysseus clinging to him, is lagging behind the pack. He
remarks

"‘Dear ram, why is it that you are the last to go out of the cave? Never
before today have I seen you lagging behind the others, but always you are the
first one to stride out and graze on the lush grass of the meadows, the first
one to reach the stream,

and the first one who wants to return to the fold at evening. But now
you are last of all. You must be grieving for your master’s eye, which a coward
attacked and blinded… If only you were endowed with reason as I am and were
able to speak, you could tell me where he is hiding."

Is Polyphemus showing affection to this ram? I think so.
He expresses his belief that the ram is feeling empathy towards him. This seems
to be an indication of reciprocated feelings. The balance of the words, where
something of an admiration for the ram’s usual boldness as well as the Cyclops’s
wish that the creature were endowed with reason, seems to support this conclusion.

As I hoped to illustrate above,
Polyphemus and his society are a little more complicated and little more
meaningful than meets the eye. The Cyclops seems to be a key that unlocks a
door into some of the ethics and morality contained in this epic.

A note on the Stephen
Mitchell Translation that I read. I had previously read the Richard Laittimore
and Robert Fagles translations. My first reading was in high school and I do
not remember who the translator was. I found Mitchell’s translation to be excellent.
It was accessible and lacked what seemed awkwardness that seemed to
characterize other translations. This translation also flowed very well. While
easier to comprehend it still retains the grandness inherent in the work.